


On Kasper and Dezso

by TanukiKyle



Series: Girl Genius OC Collection [2]
Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Gen, POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-16
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-06-02 14:54:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6570571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TanukiKyle/pseuds/TanukiKyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A slightly-more-structured fic that tells Kasper/Dezso's origins - a pair of twins set in the GG Universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You should be used to people not helping you.

When Dada died, nobody helped Mama, and she slid slowly away, until there was only a body pretending to be her. Pretending to be the one who’d sung you songs and kissed your hurts, and got dinner on the table every day. A body that held a monster that didn’t move until you made a noise too loud and then it would scream and shout and throw things at you calling you demon children, calling you monsters, ghosts, calling you Dada’s names and clutching at you so hard it hurt. 

Dezso bore the worst of it, because he’s the older twin, he tells you. It’s his job to protect you.

It’s he who convinces you to hide when the local guard knock down the door. It’s a good job, because they don’t listen to anything Mama has to say. They talk about rent, about money, about debts owed and about stuff that doesn’t make any sense. Then there’s screaming. You don’t listen after that, because you’ve got your hands pressed to your ears to block it out.

You didn’t love the body, but it still sounds like Mama.

When you emerge, the house is trashed. Dezso tells you to stay in the chest where you were hiding, but you pad after him anyway, bare feet tracking through the house until you see the front room.

There’s lots of blood. 

 

You spend some time staring at it before Dezso drags you away. 

You can’t stay there, so you ran away. It wasn’t like you’d been spending much time in the house anyway - most of the time you stayed out right until curfew, and a couple of times you had to sneak back after curfew. The pair of you know the city, you know the guards patrols, you know how to survive. It’s not like the body has been providing for you. You’re already accomplished thieves. (Is it thieving if it’s just to survive?)

You two regard that summer as probably the best time of your lives. School’s out, so nobody goes looking for you. You’ve always been insular, the pair of you, which helps that too. It’s hot in the city in summer and the tourists come flocking, there’s crowds and funfairs and in the hustle and bustle nobody notices two small children and nobody notices two small children’s hands, either.

The first winter is harder, but you’re lucky enough that an older kid takes a shine to your ability to build things out of scraps and trades you lessons on how to survive for your odd little trinkets. You’re good at this, both of you. Dezso’s got a silver tongue and a way with people. You’ve got a good eye for what’s valuable enough to steal but not enough to be missed and of putting things together out of nothing. Both of you are small and slight with quick hands and light fingers.

Plus you’re cute, and young, and relatively clean.

You’ll miss that soon.

At first it’s fun, not having to bathe, or shower, or brush your hair. To be able to go around with sticky mitts and muddy boots. To not care when your shirt gets a hole in it or trousers have a rip at the knees but.

But then it’s not because people change - go one of two ways.

Either they notice, or their eyes pass over you like you’re not anything at all. People are suspicious of you, they start watching you closer which makes things harder. You get shooed out of shops, even when you have the money to buy something. Guards’s eyes watch you more. You learn to trust in Dezso’s silver tongue even more than before, to rely on your own abilities more, to trust nobody but yourselves.

Because there are more and more of you, now. You aren’t aware of the complexities of rule in the city, or the political climate, or even the fact that the local Lord/Spark has been taken over by his son in a coup. You are aware of the fact that seems to be more and more homeless, and that the city is degenerating.

That year, there’s a lot less tourists.

The year after that there are barely any.

You watch other kids die, or disappear. You watch things happen to them in the streets that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, but. But worse than that, you watch Dezso try to keep you safe at his own expense. You argue about it, the two of you, and that’s the worst thing of all you argue and go to sleep with him cuddled around you like always and nothing changes.

Until the day it does.

You’ve been strange, lately. Obsessing over the slightest thing. You’ve always been obsessive with a thirst for knowledge - the library in the lower area of the city is probably your favourite thing, even when they started not letting you in and you had to sneak in and out instead. Your tiny machines have got more and more complicated, and even though Dezso’s read all the same books as you, he can’t figure them out anymore. (That hurts, too.)

It comes to a head the day a kitten wanders into your shelter and you fix that. You’ve fixed machines and jewellery and trinkets before but you’ve never fixed something alive, never managed to plug machinery into a living thing till it’s stronger and faster and smarter and working again.

Dezso comes home to you sitting in the middle of the floor, covered in blood and petting a kitten and talking to it.

You think he freaks out a little, but you don’t quite remember. He tells you to stay there, you think, and then the next thing you remember is going looking for him when he hasn’t come back. (There’s more animals too when you go looking, all trailing after you.)

There’s a lot of blood, when you find him. Too much blood. 

You bring him home, pump some of your own blood into him after checking you’re compatible with him- you aren’t identical twins, after all. He doesn’t wake up though, you keep him under because his injuries are severe and dangerous.

(Your brain tells you all the ways you can fix him, the ways to make him better.)

(But you’re not a trained medic. You’re not even working with ideal equipment.)

(What if something goes wrong?)

(Your brain scoffs at the idea, tells you you can do anything.)

You’re not rich, but you’d sell your soul to get Dezso help, so you get everything of worth that you’re not using, make a quick mechanical cart to trail after you (you’ve never been able to do that, before, make something so big and working and complicated but it doesn’t matter nothing matters the only thing that matters is getting him help- )

You lose yourself again, resurfacing in front of the hospital. You don’t remember getting here - and oh. Apparently at some point guards noticed you? The animals are keeping them at bay though, so you don’t think about that anymore. It’s difficult to think right now anyway. 

(At the same time, everything is clearer, brighter, faster, better. The world opens up in front of you.)

But the doctors won’t help you. They don’t want promises or work or help or anything, and they don’t want the large bag of money you’ve somehow acquired. (You have vague memories of some out-of-town merchant offering to buy your cart and you saying he could have it after you were done with it, but they flicker as you reach for them.) 

 

The guards are trying to hurt your friends outside. 

The doctors won’t help.

Nobody is helping you. Nobody is helping /Dezso/. 

You’re so tired of people not helping you.

You don’t snap, because that would imply there’s something other than the madness in you, but you stop hanging on, you let yourself go. You surface vaguely when stealing medical supplies and equipment, making sure you’re only taking what you might possibly need and you don’t take the last of anything so the patients can still be treated. 

You leave your new friends leading the guards on a merry chase round the city under your command. You trail the cart back home, unload your stuff and send it off to the merchant. And all the time you’re running ideas through your head at a mile-a-minute, and building prototypes mentally as what you think used to be a raccoon at some point nudges you in the right direction, nips at you when you need to stop or start or hide from a guard.

You duck into the old, run-down building you live in, and startle when eyes come out the darkness, then relax as you realise it’s more of your new friends.

(How many do you have, a distant part of your mind wonders, if you left all these to guard Dezso..)

You run fingers over ears and ruffs, are licked and nuzzled and headbutted as you head over to your brother and lose yourself - first in treating the things you know you can fix. The damaged eye and it’s socket, the bruises and swellings, the cuts, the loose teeth, the cracked ribs and even the broken leg - they’re all easy, now. 

But the spine, the spine. You can’t fix that as-it-is. It’s too far gone.

You know how to fix it. You can make it better even. Reinforce it so nothing like this ever happens again. Add a tail to make him balance better, compensate for the fact the spine itself will be less mobile, wire it into his nerves so he can control it.

But he’s your brother, not an animal, and despite the screaming of your brain to go to do it to make him BETTER, you know you have to ask him first, have to tell him - and, and more than that you - 

You lose yourself a little as another great idea comes to you and you sketch it out and alter it and - 

“..Kas?...”

It’s weak and dry. 

“..Kasper?”

You turn from your drawing, see Dezso on the makeshit cot, immobilized (if he moves...well, you don’t want to think about that.). You see red eyes blink at you assessingly, and suddenly you are horrified because you /don’t know what’s going on/. 

“....Dezso?”

 

Tears well up in your eyes. You’re so afraid. You don’t know what’s happening you’re so afraid.

“Sssh hey. Hey. Kasper, c’mere, I’m a little tied up right now.”

He’s lying on an operating table and he’s still trying to make you feel better.

You burst into tears - big snotty globs and heaving sobs, and the words all spill out of you all at once.

“I don’t know what’s happening! I - I’ve got all these ideas and they’re amazing and awful and everything’s so much bigger and brighter and faster but I keep losing myself look at them all I don’t remember making them and since when can I make living things Dez, since when!?”

 

You’re barely inhaling as the word torrent continues, unaware of Dezso’s soothing words he’s trying to get you to hear.

“And I know how to fix you but only because - because of this madness and what if it’s wrong, Dez, what if I mess it up what if - “

“KASPER.”

The shout snaps you out of it a little, and you hiccup. 

“It’s fine. This is normal.”

“....what?”

There is no way this is normal. Nothing about this is normal unless - 

“You’re breaking through.”  
...no  
.   
No.

 

NO.

NO THAT’S NOT

IT CAN’T

(it is, it’s so obvious now, everything makes so much more sense….)

NO

ITS NOT FAIR

 

(if you are going to die, you better fix Dezso first…)

That thought curbs your horror, at least momentarily. You wipe snot off yourself, head for the antibacterial gel you swiped from the hospital, and start talking. After a few minutes, Dezso snorts.

“In layman’s terms?”

“Your spine’s been shattered, I’m going to have to graft metal to it, but that’s going to fuck with your balance, flexibility and weight, so it’d work better with a counterbalance of a tail, but that’s up to you.”

“The tail will work better?”

“Yes.”

“...Hmm, can you make it spiky, so I can use it for fighting as well as balance?”

Your concerns have more been along the lines of making it easily maintainable for when you’re gone, but you’re not going to deny your brother anything right now. 

“Yeah. It’ll have this stuff I traded for as a core, some kind of sparkwork steel that doesn’t rust or deteoriate, so the graft to your spine won’t ever need changing, but I didn’t have enough to trade for a lot of it, so the majority of the outer shell will be regular steel, and the spines will have to be ceramic I think - that way they wont’ be too heavy, but they’ll be strong and sharp.”

“...won’t ceramic crack?”

“No, see I was thinking about that and I came up with this glaze based off this book I was reading recently - “

 

You spout off things that you know Dezso won’t understand as you inject the general anaesthetic, and you watch his eyes close. When they do, you take a few shuddering breaths and shove your fears very determinedly to the back of your head.

It doesn’t matter about you anymore.

(And you sure as hell aren't dragging Dezso down with you.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Deszo's POV!

You’ve always had priorities in life. 

You look at some people, who flounder and fuss and don’t know where they’re going or what they’re doing and you find yourself both envious and amused. Envious because they’re not the same as you, they don’t have to concentrate every day on survival, on keeping you and your brother alive. Amused because it makes them easier to manipulate, to steal from, to further your own goals.

At one point, you had dreams and hopes as well as goals. But not anymore - not with the city degenerating as it is. In one way, it’s worked well for you because you never got put into the orphanages. You use the word with more than a grain of salt. They weren’t great to begin with, but now...now they’re little more than a holding pen for subjects.

Unlike your sibling, you’ve been keeping an eye on the city in general. Bless him, but Kasper doesn’t tend to see the big picture, far too caught up in fine details. It’s why you thank whatever spirits decided that you’d be born first to guard and protect him. You don’t like to think about what would have happened to him without you around. 

The new Lord Spark is the problem, is what you have judged. Oh the city’s always been corrupt - the incident with your mother stands out to you as a good point of that - but it’s been far, far worse since he took over. Not a fan of the new rules instated on Europa, he’s planning some kind of army, you think. But whilst he’s been caught up experimenting on the people nobody will miss, the rest of the ruling council have been gouging the city, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. 

They’ve been shortsighted, though, the way they’ve done it. You’d have done it differently, subtly - edge people out with higher housing prices - but gradually so they had chance to move out, offer places on merchant caravans for cheap labour for far away places. Rejuvenate the city - start making everything higher class for the people you want around. Increase the quality of the guard, not just the quantity.

And those are just your basic ideas. 

But no. They’ve just….concentrated on certain areas of the city, made them awesome, and let the rest crumble away. Which means tourism is down, people go elsewhere for goods and services. They’re dooming the city. Not, you acknowledge, that it’s not doomed anyway with the Lord Spark - what was his name again? - well, with his plans. 

You - the pair of you - talk about leaving sometimes. Joining a caravan or just...going. But the latter is close to suicide, and no caravan will take you two. You’re too young, too scruffy, too skinny. And paradoxically too old - if you were younger you think you might have been able to play on people’s sympathies. But when you were younger things weren’t this bad, and the idea of leaving hadn’t become urgent yet. 

Now it is. 

You’ve escaped trouble by the skin of your teeth more times than you can count, and eventually the luck will run out. But that’s not why it’s urgent. That would make it pressing, but you think you would still have waited till you were older and stronger and able to legitimately make your way out the city as a caravan guard or a merchant or bodyguard to someone.

But now leaving has become your priority, even more than the day-to-day survival. In fact, it’s become an issue of survival in itself. You can no longer stay in the city. It’s always been slowly killing you while you’ve fought back, a matter of time if you will. But now time is running out in the form of an hourglass instead of a pendulum. 

 

You’ve been worrying about Kasper for a while. He’s always been obsessive about knowledge. And that would be a good thing if it weren’t for the fact it makes people interested in him - and that’s dangerous. You know he probably has the potential to be a high-class minion. Maybe even a Chief Minion. 

You won’t let him. He can’t leave you, and you’re not letting him walk into danger like that either. Maybe if the local spark wasn’t a dumbass, maybe if he didn’t have a reputation for casual cruelty, maybe if he ruled the city fairly. As it is, he doesn’t, so you don’t let Kasper anywhere near anything to do with sparks, as much as possible. Not that that’s much of a problem. You don’t know whether it’s professional or personal jealousy but the Lord doesn’t like other sparks, keeps them out of his borders. 

Which considering he murdered the last guy - his own father - to take over. Well, maybe you understand it a little bit from that perspective. 

So you’ve tried to keep him away from anything that’ll lead him down that path, but you can’t bring yourself to not let him learn, to grow. You’re selfish, but not that selfish. So you tell him the library doesn’t let homeless people in anymore, even though that’s a lie. When his face crumples, you hasten to add that you’ve found a couple of back entrances, though, so you guys can sneak it at night and take and return books like that.

He lights up, telling you about this new theory he’s been reading about and you’re torn between worry and pride. You make a few comments, but mostly you’re thinking about how you’re going to keep him away from the restricted sections now that there won’t be librarians on duty. You rather think it’ll be a battle you’ll lose.

He’s always been good with his hands, and not just in the sleight-of-hand way, not in the way you’re both good with fighting. He can build things, fix things. Trinkets and jewellery, but more than that. Little machines, tiny knick-knacks that move or rotate or (in one memorable incident) make a high-pitched noise if something enters it’s line of sight. A prototype, Kasper has insisted, he’d fix the issues next time.

Perhaps that should have warned you, but it never even occurred to you that it was anything more that intelligence with a bent towards the mechanical. He didn’t display any other signs. He didn’t get angry a lot, or think he was better than others, or like ordering anyone around.

 

He’s been worse lately, though. His obsessions have becoming driving forces. He’s even more prone to spacing out in his own head, or babbling on about something for a long time. His machines have become more complicated - though you’re putting that down to ambition and increased knowledge. He’s managed to knock up a tiny forge in the corner of the building you’re squatting in, and that was a fright.

Yes, something up with Kasper, but the pieces don’t click together till you come home one day to find him petting a constructed kitten. You frown, because you don’t connect it at first - why would the Lord be experimenting on kittens? Then you take a second look, at the blood covering Kasper’s arms. The littered equipment around, the way the forge is glowing hot, and the horror hits you. 

The Lord hasn’t been experimenting on kittens, Kasper has. Kasper was never going to be a minion. Kasper…

Kasper’s a Spark.

You close your eyes and pray to whichever spirit has been looking out for you all these years, because hell if you aren’t going to need the help now. 

You only recall one incident of a spark breaking through in town, and it gave you nightmares at the time, let alone now you’re applying it to your brother. Oh the breakthrough was bad enough, with the chaos and the panic and the clanks, but it was what happened after the spark had been apprehended that was the truly horrifying bit. You turn your mind away from what the spark had looked like by the end.

You won’t let that happen to Kasper. You won’t. You can’t. 

You’d sell your soul to keep him safe, and that might be close enough to what you have to do. Because you’ll never get out of the city legitimately now, so that only leaves the more dubious ways. You tell Kasper firmly to stay here, to make sure his new...friend is working correctly and is happy and healthy and to wait for your return.

If you return.

You know exactly how dangerous this is going to be, and the chances are slim to say the least. But it’s either this or Kasper dies. 

That is not an acceptable resolution. Even if the chances are slim, you’re going to make it work, there's no other option, and anyway, you’re good at charming people.

You are.

But not, as it turns out, good enough.

Things get a bit hazy after you get punched in the eye socket and hear something crack. Your vision disappears from that side, which makes it harder to lash out with your dagger.

(You’ve never killed someone before. Not deliberately. You’ve seen people die from starvation or dehydration and not helped them because otherwise it would be you. You’ve seen guards kill people and not get involved. Once you even stabbed a lecherous old woman who was telling Kasper how pretty he was, how the pair of you should come home with her, and then wouldn’t take no for an answer when you declined. But….you’ve never gone for the throat, like in this fight. You’ve never gutted someone or slashed a throat.)

(Somehow you thought it would be harder.)

You can’t give up, though.

If you win this fight they’ve agreed to smuggle you out of the city. You didn’t realise it was going to be like this, admittedly. When they said go fight these people they need to know we’re serious you expected to rough them up a little, fists and feet and teeth and less people actively trying to kill you.

You can’t give up though.

If you two can get out of the city, you might be able to make it. It’ll be dangerous. Potentially deadly. But it’s a better shot than you’ve got here. 

You feel your leg snap and you go down, and everything about you cries out in horror - not at the pain - but at the knowledge you’re losing. You’re losing and you can’t, you can’t - 

You struggle to your feet, and one of your opponents says something, breath heavy in the night air, blood down his front (yours or his or one of the dead?) and then there’s pain like you’ve never known from behind and you are gone.

You don’t even have time to regret it.

 

You wake slowly, which is unusual for you, you who are used to waking at the slightest disturbance in case it’s guards or unsavouries. You wake hazily, which is worse. At first you wonder if you’re sick again, and your thoughts fly towards Kasper, who must be sick too, and if you feel this bad he must be wo- 

And then your memories come back like a freight train and your eyes snap open - the rest of your body however, does not respond, which makes sense as you take in the room around you. There are more animals with that same glow to their eyes as the kitten had, surrounding Kasper who’s sketching on the rough wall with chalk in diagrams and equations you can’t understand. 

“..Kas?...”

It’s weak and dry, so your wet your mouth and try again.

“..Kasper?”

He turns round with speed, and you study him assessingly. 

He’s not hurt - at least any more than before - and whilst there are pronounced bags under his eyes, he seems relatively stable (you know that sparks in breakthrough sometimes aren’t, that sometimes the most dangerous thing to them is themselves, and that terrifies you. You can protect him from the outside world….but you can’t do anything about his own brain.)

To your horror, he begins to cry, tears welling up in his eyes. As a child, Kasper had always been a crybaby, but that’d stopped long ago - you don’t think you’ve seen him cry for….well, you don’t remember how long. Before Dada died, you think. You can’t move either, can’t go to hug him, pet his hair, tug at it gently and remind him to share his worries.

“Sssh hey. Hey. Kasper, c’mere, I’m a little tied up right now.”

The words trip out of your mouth, a far cry from your usual smooth tongue, and what’s worse is that Kasper breaks into heaving sobs. 

“I don’t know what’s happening! I - I’ve got all these ideas and they’re amazing and awful and everything’s so much bigger and brighter and faster but I keep losing myself look at them all I don’t remember making them and since when can I make living things Dez, since when!?”

 

Oh how can someone so smart be so stupid? Bless him. Bless your mad, stupid brother. You talk at him, soothing words and reassurances, but it doesn’t seem to get through, he’s caught up in this torrent of words.

“And I know how to fix you but only because - because of this madness and what if it’s wrong, Dez, what if I mess it up what if - “

...he knows how to fix you? If he can fix you, you guys can still make it. 

“KASPER.”

You shout, because you can’t shake him to snap him out of it. Thankfully, the shouting seems to do the trick, and he blinks wide-eyed at you. 

“It’s fine. This is normal.”

“....what?”

He still hasn’t got it, and you wonder idly if it’s some kind of defense mechanism.

“You’re breaking through.”

Kasper takes a while to process that, and then, abruptly the smell of antibacterial gel hits the air and he starts talking. You….have very little idea what’s being said. You stopped being able to keep up with Kasper a long time ago in scientific fields. 

Which probably should have been another warning sign.

“In layman’s terms?”

“Your spine’s been shattered, I’m going to have to graft metal to it, but that’s going to fuck with your balance, flexibility and weight, so it’d work better with a counterbalance of a tail, but that’s up to you.”

A tail. That...doesn’t disturb you as much as it should, you think. It might be the drugs, or it might be the knowledge that you’re leaving the city. Here there are very few constructs, and those that exist are either in the direct purview of the Lord Spark (you’d spit if you could) or are connected to the nobles in the city as little more than slaves. 

 

You’ll happily pretend to be Kasper’s slave if it keeps him safe. And for that you need to be in peak condition.

“The tail will work better?”

You double-check, just to clarify your own thoughts and ideas.

“Yes.”

“...Hmm, can you make it spiky, so I can use it for fighting as well as balance?”

If you’re going to have a tail, you want something useful. 

“Yeah. It’ll have this stuff I traded for as a core, some kind of sparkwork steel that doesn’t rust or deteoriate, so the graft to your spine won’t ever need changing, but I didn’t have enough to trade for a lot of it, so the majority of the outer shell will be regular steel, and the spines will have to be ceramic I think - that way they wont’ be too heavy, but they’ll be strong and sharp.”

You nod as Kasper puts something in your IV line.

“...won’t ceramic crack?”

That’s the last coherent thought you have for a while.

“No, see I was thinking about that and I came up with this glaze based off this book I was reading recently - “

You drift off to the reassuring tones of your brothers voice, safe in the knowledge that this time you’ll wake up okay, and then you can work on getting out of this mess together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thankfully Dezso is more aware, so you get a better idea of the underlying situation!

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter is a little frustrating to me because there's so much going on behind the scenes that Kasper has ~no idea~ about, so I can't explain. xD;


End file.
